Simon Stålenhag

• Developed: the good for 1000 years, 5-dimensional memory crystal
• Forget LED bulbs—the future of interior lighting is lasers
• After 50,000 generations, bacteria continue evolving greater fitness
• Fourier Transform: The Math Trick Behind MP3s, JPEGs, and Homer Simpson’s Face
• Recent surface warming has probably been underestimated
• What Happens to Google Maps When Tectonic Plates Move?
• How a hatred of bureaucrats and a wall saved a Japanese nuclear plant from meltdown after tsunami
• China will look to Thorium Salt reactors for energy starting in 2040
• China unveils boldest reforms in decades
• Why Scandinavian women make the rest of the world jealous
• Pope’s unprecedented survey signals far-reaching reform
• Abandoned Walmart is now America’s largest one-floor Library
• How One Man Earned 4 Million Airline Miles by Buying Dollar Coins
• Alison Bechdel on the Bechdel Test
• Fuck yeah! AMC Ordering ‘Preacher’ Pilot
• Rave and Hardcore YouTube Comments Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity
• Some of history’s weirdest and fiercest combat helmets
• White Teen In Blackface Responds To Black Critics: ‘Worry About Finding Your Dad’
• Brazil referee decapitated after stabbing player

Plus, Howard, the world’s first Kim Jong-un Impersonator. I want one for my birthday party.

…or catching up on about three months of internet.

Science

• Charles Darwin’s ecological experiment on Ascension Isle
• Lizards Rapidly Evolve After Introduction to Island
• Dinosaur Feathers Discovered in Canadian Amber
• 419-million-year-old armoured fish fossil resolves ‘missing link’ in evolution, scientists say
• Scientists link genes to why wounds heal quicker for young people
• DNA Double Take – having multiple sets of DNA is pretty common
• Scientist discovers DNA ‘biological clock’
• Gamers solve decade old HIV puzzle in ten days
• New drug mimics the beneficial effects of exercise
• Getting drunk without the hangover or health risks – scientist seeks investment for ‘alcohol substitute’ drug
• The Rat Pack study – Drug addiction: The complex truth
• Tastes Like Chicken: How one company created a plausible substitute for meat that has the texture of real flesh.
• How the shape of chocolate can change its taste
• How much can an extra hour’s sleep change you?
• Sleep – Now By Prescription
• Sleep debt and recovering from it
• The Curious Case of Polywater: In the 1960s, scientists ‘discovered’ a new form of water. How did they get it so wrong?
• Global warming: What the leading scientists say
• First sign that humanity is slowing its carbon surge
• Looking to disprove climate change, Nebraska fails in finding scientists to participate
• Breaking Deep-Sea Waves, as High as a Skyscraper, Reveal Mechanism for Global Ocean Mixing
• What would it be like if another planet just barely missed colliding with the Earth?
• Celebrating the Nobel win for it’s discovery, NYTimes made this great explanation as to what the Higgs is
• The Apmlituhedron: A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics
• Quantum Experiment Shows How Time ‘Emerges’ from Entanglement
• The Crew That Never Came Home: The Misfortunes of Soyuz 11

Technology

Dialup handshake example

• The Printer That Can Print A 2,500 Square Foot House In 20 Hours.
• Transfer a secret audio message by poking someone with your finger
• Hyperloop—a theoretical 760 mph transit system made of sun, air, and magnets
• Police firing GPS tracking ‘bullets’ at cars during chases
• Engineers use sound waves to detect bombs remotely
• The Status of Moore’s Law: It’s Complicated
• Return of the Borg: How Twitter Rebuilt Google’s Secret Weapon
• You Might Have an Invisible Facebook Account Even if You Never Signed Up
• Hackers Courted by Government for Cyber Security Jobs: The Geeks on the Front Lines
• I challenged hackers to investigate me and what they found out is chilling
• Debugging a live Saturn V rocket

Sociology (and stuff)

The 1939 New York World’s Fair

• Is Google Wrecking Our Memory? Nope. It’s (transactive memory) much, much weirder than that.
• Why even the worst bloggers are making us smarter
• Online comment systems reveal multiple layers of social bias
• The datamune difference between funny and LOL
• The 29 Stages Of A Twitterstorm
• Kids Can’t Use Computers… And This Is Why It Should Worry You
• A vast cloud of blah: Charlie Brooker on taking a break from columns
• A Slate backpack investigation: When Did Two-Strapping Get Cooler Than One-Strapping?
• Even babies discriminate until taught not to
• Man… The ocean is broken
• The debate over: Is population growth out of control?
• Sweden closes four prisons as number of inmates plummets
• Urban Design: The secrets of the world’s happiest cities
• Golden Gate Bridge: Triumph, Tragedy : Suicide Rate Shadows the Span’s 50th-Anniversary Celebration
• PBS commentator Mark Shields says more killed by guns since ’68 than in all U.S. wars
• Amazon and the “profitless business model” fallacy
• Stoya on ethics, porn and worker’s rights
• 16 People On Things They Couldn’t Believe About America Until They Moved Here
• How to be miserable in ten easy steps
• Ten Surprising Facts About Rejection
• Comfort In, Dump Out: the Kvetching Order of handling traumatic (or any other kind of) crisis
• Perceiving Time: Why Waiting Is Torture
• Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

Media

Supercut: 50 “four in the morning”s – Museum of Four in the Morning

• Warren Ellis on Breaking Bad and the Horrible Glory of Heisenberg
• Korra’s a Girl? TV producers think boys won’t watch girl heroines. Turns out that’s not true.
• Netflix studies piracy sites to decide what to buy
• Study accuses media companies of cooking the books on piracy losses
• David Byrne: ‘The internet will suck all creative content out of the world’
• How Marvel Unified Its Movie Universe (And Why That Won’t Be Easy for DC)
• Lucasfilm will combine video games and movies to axe post-production process
• Why Stephen King Spends ‘Months and Even Years’ Writing Opening Sentences
• Why Everyone Gets Robocop But Nobody Gets Starship Troopers
• Todd Alcott: Some thoughts on the state of screenwriting in 2013
• ‘Canned laughter’ doesn’t exist, so why complain about it?
• Soundworks: The Sound of Gravity

Randomness

https://thumbsandammo.blogspot.co.nz/

• Animals would stop the zombie apocalypse before it started
• “Christ, what an asshole” works for everything
• 35 years after the clock tower shooting, Whitman belatedly claims his 15th victim
• A Marine recounts his one afternoon with a notorious serial killer
• Get ordained for free as a Dudeist minister
• Mexico’s Tales of Bus Passengers Forced to Fight to the Death
• Colombian women get their road fixed by refusing to have sex
• Civ II’s “Eternal War” continues on reddit more than a year later
• Carpet designer threatens cosplayers with legal action
• This Guy’s Eaten Nothing but Raw Meat for Five Years
• A map of Pangea with modern political borders
• What happens when you replace guns with thumbs up?
• Images of Vietnam Zippo engravings (yes, gratifying rewards too as a Preacher fan)
• The wonderfully wierd emoticon art of Ryder Ripps
• Questlove’s Celebrity Stories
• Back to toilet reading basics with new technology: backlabel
• Webgame: Z-Type

Christ…

Evolution of the alphabet

I really should be posting this stuff more often rather than piling up these posts over the course of days. Well, should…

• So Cool: A surgical knife that diagnoses cancer almost immediately on contact
• Shit. Lack of sleep is key in activating excessive worrying
• Elon Musk wants to get you from NY to LA in 45 minutes
• Curiosity Mars Rover Passes Kilometer of Driving
• Four scientists debate on the origins of mathematics
• Damn, I want to see this chart: Family Tree of Fish Yields Surprises
• 33,000 feet (10 Km) up, is a bubble of bacteria that surrounds the Earth
• When at the ends of the Earth: On getting drunk in Antartica
• How Scientology changed the internet
• Woman’s work: The twisted reality of an Italian freelancer in Syria
• Yes: I Write All My Blog Posts Out Longhand, and You Should Too
• Reuters, deliberately toning down their Climate Change coverage
• Here’s What It Looks Like When You Replace Photographers With iPhone-Wielding Reporters
• Think Your Office Is Soulless? Check Out This Amazon Fulfillment Center
• Woman sues Japan Yamaguchi-gumi crime boss to refund protection money over “employer liability”
• If true, this is a charming twitter story of how Erin Faulk tried to find Matt Damon
• From the master cinematographer: 20 Tips by Roger Deakins
• Rock, Paper, Shotgun interviews Charlie Brooker
• They’re making a Star Wars comic based on the original draft, looks good
• 10 of the most cryptic texts in the world
• Gallery: What does 200 Calories look like?
• Whoa, an augmented reality colouring book: colAR App

Rare Color Photography of Early 1900s Paris

• An interview with Steven Soderbergh on his career and quitting Hollywood
• How alcohol disrupts your REM sleep patterns
• Why Malaria’s Magnus is celebrated by Wales’ Wikipedia Day
• The Chapelle de Bathléem and its sci-fi gargoyles
• The ‘Horror Frog’ breaks its own bones to produce claws
• Nine cat behavior lessons
• Humans and animals: How and why do we pick our friends?
• The EU’s plan for 50,000 EV charging stations by 2020

This looks good. Fingers crossed it’s less heavy handed than The Cove which, while excellent, was pretty self-indulgent in the filmmakers portraying themselves as the ‘framing subject’. The same thing looks to be going on here, but much more justified considering it’s just ice. And holy crap, that is some amazing footage of a lot of ice.

• The ‘Mad Men’ Economic Miracle: the new business model that’s brought on a wave of great TV
• From the Criterion Collection: Christopher Nolan, self-made filmmaker
• Facebook scans private messages for brand page mentions, admits a bug is boosting Likes
• GravityLight: lighting for developing countries
• Quantum networks may be more realistic than we thought
• Largest glacier break-up yet caught on video
• Video: These guys get two hookers to re-enact a scene from Braveheart
• Video: Kids songs with Cat Power

History of Comics in 6 Panels with write up via Paul Lopes

• The first color 360-degree panorama from Curiosity
• The Internet May Have Upended Traditional Institutions, But It’s a Brittle Weapon
• The Internet Archive Now Offers Torrent Downloads
• New software that helps employers read your emotional state
• New Global Warming Culprit: Dams
• New salt-based battery a leap for green energy
• How rogue biohackers are revolutionising the human body
• The science of Staring
• A new prehistoric species of humans identified
• Conservative pundits are plain wrong: Barack Obama hasn’t lost Europe. That was his predecessor’s doing.
• How billionaire backers pick America’s candidates
• The Fog of War: How can we talk about the military if we can’t define what it is?
• The Elephant in the Map Room: The Israel/Palestine Border
• The 1916 Shark Attacks that were the inspiration for Jaws
• Wait… There’s a 30 minute longer cut of The Shining?